Guide to claiming Disability Student Allowance (DSA)

Graham Rice, Assistive IT Support at the Central London Assessment Services (CLASS), University of Westminster, provides advice about claiming the Disabled Students’ Allowance (DSA) at university and the support that students with specific learning difficulties such as dyslexia are entitled to.

Students in higher education living in England with a disability or specific learning difficulty such as dyslexia, can apply for the DSA. The DSA is a government grant designed to ensure that students with specific learning difficulties are not at a disadvantage when taking part in higher education. It is paid as a supplementary grant on top of an individual’s other student finance and does not have to be repaid.

Eligibility

To apply for the DSA, the individual must have a disability or long-term health condition, mental health condition or specific learning difficulty like dyslexia or dyspraxia. They must also be an undergraduate or postgraduate student (including Open University or distance learning), have a condition that affects their ability to study, qualify for student finance from Student Finance England and be studying a course that lasts at least a year.

Support available

How much someone receives depends on the individual needs and not on the household income and can also be affected if the course is part-time. The student can receive help for specialist equipment such as a PC, computer software and also receive support from a non-medical helper like a note-taker or reader. The individual can also be eligible for a general allowance which covers costs such as disposable media, extra travel costs due to their disability, and photocopying. The maximum sum payable for the whole term of the course is £5,161.

Reading and writing difficulties

A common disability is dyslexia which affects 10 per cent of students and is a difficulty that affects reading and writing. People with dyslexia often have difficulty with the production of words and find it easier to type. Using the DSA grant, students can apply for speech recognition software used to convert the speech to text. The software automatically checks the spelling and underlines misspelt words in blue or red.

Texthelp’s Read&Write Gold literacy software has a screen reader, spelling and Optical Character Recognition (OCR) functionality so that students can take lesson hand-outs and books, scan them in and have them read back.  

It works on PC and Mac brilliantly and when something is typed in it can be read back in  a range of  international voices and enables users to create MP3 files of the spoken text.

As well as reading and writing software most students can apply for a 15” laptop such as a Toshiba that will last the 3-4 years which they can keep at the end of the course.

Reading and writing is necessary

Typing is very important and we put typing tutors on most of the PCs because even if students are doing a fine arts project they still need to write a report. Students on creative courses typically do not expect to have to write 10-15,000 dissertation on Gauguin for example and they often come and see us.

People with specific learning difficulties have good strategies for coping which work quite well for the first year, but at the beginning of the second year it becomes a lot harder. They start to struggle then and we get quite a few that go through the DSA process at this point. It would be much better if they had the software and adopt good practices from day one.

Apply early

The process can take 10 weeks so we recommend students apply early as this is a long time to wait if you are struggling. This gives students time to become familiar with the technology. From April before their course starts students that have a conditional place can go to student finance, say that they are eligible for DSA and start the process.

Issues around reading and writing are similar even if they do not necessarily know much about the course they plan to take. In some instances students will already be using support tools before they come to university otherwise they can come to us and will provide the technology and training.

With other more physical disabilities we can put in place support immediately. If, for example, they need screen enlarging software we can often have the PC ready on day one.

How to apply

If a student believes they are eligible for DSA they can submit an application form available from the education section of gov.uk. The form is then returned to Student Finance England (SFE) with supporting evidence detailing the disability such as a letter from the doctor.

Once the application has been reviewed and accepted then the student will receive a letter from SFE confirming their eligibility and asking them to book a DSA Assessment appointment.

Needs assessment appointment

The ‘needs assessment appointment’ is designed to assess each person’s requirements and to determine which technologies may help minimise the impact of the disability.

To book an assessment the student must contact a Disabled Students Allowance Quality Assurance Group (DSA QAG) approved assessment centre. There are hundreds of assessment centres across the UK and the student can find the one that is closest to their home by visiting the DSA QAG website.

After the assessment, the student will get a report listing equipment and other support they can get for their course, which they can then apply for.

Graham Rice is Assistive IT Support at the Central London Assessment Services (CLASS) at the University of Westminster.

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